Sally RooneyLiterary Fiction · Contemporary Literature·b. 1991
Intermezzo
Synopsis
Following the death of their father, brothers Peter and Ivan Koubek are barely speaking. Peter is a driven human rights lawyer in his thirties, outwardly composed but privately unraveling; Ivan, ten years younger, is a former chess prodigy whose once-promising career has stalled, left more comfortable with chess theory than people.
Peter is torn between Naomi, a university student with whom he has an unconventional, financially entangled relationship, and Sylvia, his college girlfriend whose accident years earlier changed the shape of what they could be to each other. Ivan, meanwhile, meets Margaret, an arts center director more than a decade his senior, at a small-town chess exhibition — a connection neither of them expects to matter as much as it does.
Told in alternating perspectives and Rooney's now-signature close, unadorned prose, Intermezzo is less about the romances themselves than about two brothers circling the same grief from opposite directions, trying to work out what they owe each other.
How it reads
Prose complexity 7/10
Content warnings (5)
Death Of A ParentSuicideSubstance AbuseSexual ContentViolence
- Intermezzo is a novel I wanted to love more than I actually did, which might be the most accurate way to describe my relationship with it—it's Sally Rooney doing what she does best, but that does-what-she-does-best isn't quite enough to elevate this beyond competent into genuinely transcendent. The bones are excellent, the thematic architecture is sound, and yet something feels slightly hollow at the center, a hesitation where there should be devastation. The premise is magnetic: two brothers grieving their father's recent death respond in almost antithetical ways, and their grief becomes entangled with romantic complications that expose deeper fractures in their emotional lives. Peter, the successful lawyer in his mid-thirties, medicates his way through loss with pills and frantic activity, caught between his longtime love Sylvia (disabled and withdrawn after an accident) and Naomi, a younger woman he's drawn to in ways that feel more predatory than romantic. Ivan, the awkward 22-year-old chess prodigy, meets Margaret, a 36-year-old woman emerging from divorce, and their connection becomes intense and consuming in ways that terrify Peter precisely because they seem authentic. What Rooney does beautifully here is differentiate the brothers' interior monologues through prose style itself. Ivan's chapters are precise and analytical, anxious and rambling, the prose reflecting his chess-trained mind turning over problems methodically. Peter's chapters are fragmented and harder to follow, his thoughts muddy with substances and contradictions, the writing itself reflecting his inability to hold coherence. This is skilled technical writing, and I appreciated the sophistication of Rooney's approach. And the women are rendered with genuine complexity. Sylvia and Naomi both demonstrate clarity about what the brothers cannot see—that Peter is using them to avoid confronting his own emptiness rather than genuinely connecting with them. Margaret similarly maintains her own subjectivity despite Ivan's attempts to mythologize her, refusing to become simply the receptacle for his grief. Rooney has a gift for portraying how women often function as mirrors forcing men to see themselves, and these women don't soften or forgive simply because the men suffer. But here's where I stalled: the fundamental pattern feels too familiar if you've read Rooney's previous work. The fumbling, the emotional repression, the ways men damage through passive inaction, the women who see clearly and are not sufficient to save them anyway—this is Rooney's territory, and while she executes it skillfully, I found myself feeling like I was reading a variation on a theme rather than encountering something genuinely new. The messiness differs from Normal People or Conversations with Friends, but the emotional architecture feels recognizable in ways that diminish surprise. Additionally, the choice to narrate large portions through Margaret's perspective in Ivan's chapters confused me emotionally. Rather than deepening our understanding of Margaret, it felt like it actually diluted her presence, giving us less access to Ivan at moments when his interiority seemed most crucial. The narrative balance tips toward Peter despite the structural symmetry, making him the more developed character and therefore the one whose emotional journey feels more substantial. The violence that erupts between the brothers felt somewhat inevitable once I saw it coming, and that inevitability undermined its emotional impact. The confrontation is brutal and shocking on the page, but psychologically, I felt ahead of the narrative—I understood the trajectory of their relationship and could predict the breaking point. Great tension requires surprise or at minimum doubt about outcome; here, the dominoes felt predetermined. What also troubled me is the treatment of the age gap between Ivan and Margaret. While the novel doesn't endorse it, it also doesn't fully interrogate the power dynamics at play—a 22-year-old grieving man and a 36-year-old recently divorced woman beginning a sexual relationship raises questions that the narrative largely sidesteps. The novel presents this connection as genuine rather than exploring the potential exploitation baked into the scenario. That said, Rooney remains a writer of considerable gifts. Her ability to capture how grief distorts relationships, how men particularly struggle to feel and articulate emotion, how the attempt to control others emerges from our own interior chaos—these insights are consistently perceptive. The quiet moments where characters glimpse their own complicity in the damage they've caused are handled with nuance. Intermezzo is a competent, well-executed novel that explores familiar emotional territory with skill and occasional grace. If this were my first Rooney, I suspect I'd feel more enthusiastic about it. But for readers familiar with her work, there's a sense that she's refining technique without necessarily expanding vision. It's a three-star book because it's undeniably well-written and emotionally engaged, but it hovers just at the edge rather than tipping decisively over into something unforgettable.
- <div>Easy flowing like river with the conversations and the events</div>